Bye column,

The question, I believe, is not whether there is a torch to be passed, but rather: is there someone to receive the torch?

Hell week, the one that places itself near an endpoint – for me, this is high time to make drama. A little bit. Because for the past 14, 15 issues of this paper, I have been here, ogling at the ridiculous, mocking the reserved, floundering and making sort of love confessions, feigning political inclinations, and tacitly wondering: would I ever be replaced here? Next sem, when all Fitzgerald and a thesis proposal on indie films end, I would call myself a “graduating student.” And as early as now, I am not cringing. Else, I am most certain that the time has come to step out of this corner of your official student publication, and the only publication that has been the smartest, most honest, most pro-student offered to all of you. When I first approached the lanky guy that used to be an editor here two years ago, I was saying, “Hey, ahm, I think I write good enough to deserve a column here.” That was too confident, if not egotistic, but they were thinking about lightening the hefty politics the paper contains, enwrapped in articles about peace talks and the global crisis, so perhaps that made them accept my rather forward proposal; so that someone who is interestingly self-anointing and boastful would lament her woes, from academics, to infatuations, to Student councils that are only nominal, in their monthly paper.

This time is the time to move on. First, shut the fuck off the yabang. Second, concentrate on thesis and the remaining academic units. Third, go where others seem to be heading, joyously or otherwise. A guy seen by others as Jimmy Neutron outgrows this publication, this UP Baguio gradually after graduation. He is now busy looking first-hand at the plight of indigenous people constantly harassed by the military. The current External Associate Editor has shed off some modesty and begun putting some special hands in hers. The Internal Associate Editor has swallowed what was once a bitter idea: those who remain had to do things on their own. The former Internal Associate Editor has slightly put off her fairy tales in favor of Dostoevsky and Conrad. The former EIC is staying at his momentary postmodern haven. And the one that succeeded him, she has learned first to be more visible, then to preside during meetings where once she was mostly mum, then learned the trick of juggling readings and reports and publication and some fun lest she dreamt of being eaten alive by her circumstances.

Move on and leave that comfort zone, these seem to be telling me. For I would admit, in the vaguest of ways, these red letters have symbolized a comfort zone for me: a place where I am just a name, a 600-word composition, letters to a number of readers.

So while I’m still here, and while I still have this last piece, I’ll fire away the usual Kitty manner, not much drama, not much pretentiousness: to those who will replace me, I am praying you won’t be too nerved to emulate my eloquence and ahem, plain, cute brilliance.

What Shakespeare taught me about libel

During my chosen lockout from the reminders of a daunting thesis proposal whose threat I still deny sometimes and King Lear reading assignments, I tried to placate myself and avoid total unproductivity by rereading Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, one of his most acclaimed comedy which I did not find arguable.

Okay, a long introduction. It seems like I am already into writing mode that I gleefully think compares to the way one imagines Denis Johnson when he writes his megabook “Trees of Smoke”: under a succubus’s spell in a fallout shelter—hair long, unshaven, chain-smoking, frenzied to get the words out.

I first read Twelfth Night during the holidays, and what an apt time that was, because the Twelfth Night is about, following the British tradition, the twelve days of Christmas beginning on the 25^th where boundless celebration is the flavor of the time, verging on utter disregard of conventional norms and expectations — the slaves letting go of that dark designation, even for a while, and they could treat their masters as equals, chat with them, play cards with them, toast champagne with them. But sadness lies in the idea that no matter how festive the atmosphere could be during these twelve days, everything will return to where they were on the 6^th of January. And paradoxically, the more festive the twelve days were, the more haunting will be the reversion to normality, the more painful would be that reminder: Hey, we are slaves again; they are our masters again. Just another embittering paradox of life.

While love and petty attraction seems to be one of the more dominant themes of the play, I share with other readers the special attention given to the idea of foolishness. Situated in that context of twelve days of merriment, albeit a known foolish one, there has to be something, or someone guarding the entire flow of lunacy, lampooning the events and making people check their own so-called sane dispositions. In the play, there was Feste, who happens to be my favorite because he seemed to be the one who played that role – the satirical commentator about the oddness of people while they bask in the twelve days of limitless possibilities.

Feste was looked at with contempt because of his so-called inherent foolishness. They say it has not nothing to do with the twelve days; he’s just plain foolish. But Feste maintains his ground, dismissing the contempt and went on with his witty antics, which at several points, seem to effectively challenge the positions of characters who think of themselves as “sane.”

In an interesting exchange with Olivia, the primary female protagonist in the comedy who despised Feste for his “foolishness,” Feste only had sardonic retorts: “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.” Feste then continued his smart verbal frolicking, asserting that he can prove that Olivia, and not him, was the fool one. He asked why Olivia was mourning and she said that it’s because of her brother’s death. Feste then replied that he thinks her brother is in hell to which she answered that she believes he is in heaven. And then goes Feste again, returning something to Olivia that insults her argument: “The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven.”

And where are we left, but perhaps at that dazed position, perhaps taken aback and murmuring with incredulity, “Hey, the ‘fool’ has a point.” And so further we ask, who is more foolish now?

Feste plays on the incredibility of appearances primarily through the slipperiness of language, one of the chief medium by which we negotiate what appears to us. And Feste’s satires burn and hit, making us see the flaws of our own statements.

Then I ponder on it: Is not satire one of the cleverest forms our freedom of expression takes? It is subsumed in that freedom and cannot be excluded just because it calls attention to itself while undermining certain propositions, exposing the filth in certain actions. Will someone file a libel case on me because of this? When does libel begins; when does satire lose its biting wit and when does freedom of expression end?

These are questions hovering in my head because I really feel the urgency to clarify them, especially now that people call someone “pandak” or “penoy” or “inutil na pangulo” and get no libel case filed against them.

 

 

The urge to become zombies and defying social expectations

When the sun descends and establishments begin to close one after the other, the people start trooping one of the busiest streets in the Central Business District every morning – Harrison Road.  Carrying hefty bags containing items to be opened to the frenzied buyers all throughout the night, they start their rather unusual but perhaps enjoyable quest for livelihood. And slowly, even before every “stall” has completely arranged its products, passersby begin to swim in the sea of products, most likely eyeing a quality buy, looking for something they can buy thrice the price in other establishments.

When establishments like BPI, Metrobank and Tiongsan have already slept for the day, it is high time for these small vendors to rise and conquer the night, negotiate with haggling customers and be aided by second-hand jackets and hot servings of lomi and lugaw against the February late night to early morning air — all in the name of sustaining their living. When the establishments have closed, it is the time for these little vendors to set up their own “business” and capture their own market. Also, when the moon curtains the people from the day, they start, rather rabidly, to conquer the night in their own ways.

Rolando Tolentino used the term catatonia to describe this – how people seem to parrot the zombies in traditional horror films, thriving in the night, seeking to devour the marrows that are hardly available during the day. Bluntly put, the laws are dead. That is why perhaps, for instance, the traffic lights rule becomes more lenient; pickpockets and other law-transgressors swarm more openly. On the lighter side of things, others have less “socially reprehensible” behaviors, yet ones that they can still hardly do during the day. People let go of the inhibitions they have when the sun is beaming, when the seemingly harsh, judging gaze of an unspoken other is most scrutinizing: partying like it’s the end of the world, sorry Jay Sean, in Nevada; drinking, or drowning the night away with coffee in some posh or outlying bar or café, singing wildly through Session Road.

And does not the Harrison night market, that thriving enterprise operates within that framework, too? The vendors maximize the temporary death of its big counterparts – establishments like SM and Tiong San which they do not seem to have any real match. And then for the passersby, does not the night market provides an alternative getaway place during nights of intense desire to ambulate and idle especially if one is short on cash?

In the end, what we have in the night is a seeming freedom hardly accessible during the day. With the liveliness of laws and regulations that arguably seek to define or modify human behavior, the day is usually reduced to mechanization. For people in the office, eight to five is almost routinarily served for work; for students, mornings are for classes and other school work they do not often find attractive or challenging; for the ones who suffer from unignorable lack and compelled to defy order just to carry on, days require unimaginable deft and skill just to pull off a lawless trick and manage to serve food to oneself.

And when the day is gone and the night begins to breathe, people like the vendors in the night market and their rather manic customers begin to howl like foxes and screech like bats welcoming with unbridled excitement the time for what they believe is tantamount to limitless possibilities, all absent during the day when institutions and the expectations concomitant to them are at their most forceful.

Ang mga zombies.Ang mga zombies. Nanggaling ito sa: http://www.mypattaya.com/picture_album7.asp

Salita lang ang pag-ibig sa post na ‘to

If only encountering “love” is like hearing “Yes, I do” from marriage proposals, I would have been already holding a record for accidental adultery.

Let us prolong the trending, today is still, well, Valentine’s week. And I have been looking at Close-up commercials, restaurants’ and cafes’ “Valentines” designs, greeting cards in National Book Store which can confuse the child on the real anatomical structure of that things inside her skin.  

People are heeding The Beatles: all we need is love, and sometimes, Mariah Carey, too, because they want to know what love is. Pop songs sell and venues for Valentines concerts became the zones for display of affection, somewhere else, there is neither Brian McKnight or Nina on the background.

 

***

What happens when hecklings, and the all-we-know mudslinging resurface in an event that is supposed to be uniting, more than anything else. On top the rostrums, there can only be smelly rhetorics, thanks to the repugnant fakeness by which the nice-sounding words were delivered. “Para sa estudyante” is a common denominator, but that seems to be the only terrain where they meet, those candidates that are sadly turning into the Aquinos and Marcoses of the campus.

Because if someone claims “No to Partisan Politics” but himself swims in it, thrives in it, then we are not only confronting hypocrisy, we are confronting its more wicked sibling – deception. And in my three years of relative peace in UP Baguio, Wednesday was the most perturbing, Thursday the most alarming. If my candidates for the student council are cracked, and much more, if the winning candidates know how to do heckling, and marauding someone’s own peace, then I do now know how un-student, the “student” in student council will be in the coming months.

***

Because as far as I know, you stay in the Student Council to represent the students, not his or her party.

Now where is the love in this month of, puking foretold, cherry blossoms and pumpkin pies and used rubbers?

***

My housemates arrived, joyous with Thursday’s results:

“Hey, Kitty, let’s think we are in a sitcom. What did you to last Valentines?”

It was him, horrible.

“Nag-isaw kami ng mga kaibigan ko tapos nanood ng Kubrador.”

“Uy, speak in English naman, we’re in an American sitcom.”

“I haven’t watched a sitcom where someone says at the beginning, “Hey, lets think  we’re in a sitcom.”

***

Who told you gambling is bad for the world? Lovers have been gambling as much as I listen to Rose Melberg in 3:53ams and it persists as the most tangible, the only real universal phenomenon in this cube of racism and crippling Nazism, and fascinating jews and commercialization, not equality, not justice, not growth, not peace, not commitment, not solidarity, not dedication.

Mula ito sa: http://nouradebbouchecontemporaryartist.blogspot.com/

When Panagbenga begun, I flew

What happened yesterday when there is an increased traffic in this blog, a barrage of text messages in my phone and a bashful torrent of posts in Facebook? Nineteen years ago, yesterday, people were contemplating on the image of Mary and what are her contributions on Feminism, judges are being indicted to expose the flaws of how humans do justice, and perhaps the Philippines is watching Fidel Ramos make a speech or two about tobacco and embracing foreign investments. All the while, my sister was young yet frenetic, anticipating a younger sibling whom she can share her Barbie dolls with, whom she would teach Humpty Dumpty to. At six, I wondered how she took the sight of our mother bleeding up to her feet, contesting pain and redefining endurance as she brought out on earth a future precocious little girl holding sand in her palm to have a fine handwriting.

Then in Chinese General Hospital in Quezon City, some mothers are perhaps relieved after having just gave birth, to a son, a future botanist, a daughter, a future fighter of women’s rights, a future drag, a future scavenger, and street player. But if we are talking about the arrival of dusk just yet, I was not yet here. I was just about to erupt from my mother’s womb, out to her vagina, out to the world with its invitations of sadomasochism. My mother said the operation nearly took two hours. “Mabilis bay un Ma o hindi?” It was pretty normal, and she noted, “At least hindi ako sinecaesarian.” Mom, at most, I breathe here, right now, typing this down and about to introduce this next subhead where for all my intents, I hope to be a winding elocution of “Thank you.”  

 

Happy birthday to me, so thank you Ma

To all who greeted, I am slightly nodding my head and smiling, but this day is cheers to my mom. Thanks to you but more thanks to my mom, who, nineteen years ago yesterday mustered enough respiration and will to get me out, and allowed me to see Dexter and Didi and Pocahontas and listen to the loneliness of Feist and the rudeness of Lourd de Veyra. So don’t give gifts to me; give them to my mom, or at least, give her a tap in the back, or oversay “thank you” to her for sending that modest genius daughter of yours to earth, and allowing her to enroll at UP Baguio and smite the security guards and the curious passersby.

I texted her, last night, at the near end of my birthday, “Ma! Birthday ko, thank you, for bringing me here. And for the greetings and the love, and for the allowance, hehe. Treat kita pagbaba ko. I lab you. J” is that cheesy? Can you tell me if so, as in, make a reply below, say to me that was cheesy and it made you puke. Since entering UP Baguio, I became this more expressive daughter kissing my mom in her shoulders or something, giving her personalized cards when it’s her birthday. I said you should be celebrating right now, because nineteen years ago, you bore a child; you added not just another statistic on the population, but another person who would think about the world but continuing to give love to you, and respect to you despite the misunderstandings.

And the rats are coming after me.

So I ended gulping this cola.

There is Friday in Wednesday

First, I was a bit saddened when they said that only elementary and high school students won’t have classes yesterday. I was giggling at the idea of having some early quest for joyfulness starting Tuesday night, whisking the light drinks on the tabletop and mentioning poetries with some friends, but the official announcements made me delay its fulfillment. So what happened? It was nothing but routine, 7am for thesis proposal and more of western literature. But that is definitely a routine worth gorging at. Someone mentioned Sylvia Plath in passing in his blog and I reckoned the chance that I will meet him personally in the future, touch elbows with him and face him with his thin eyeglass on a coffee shop table. And can I mention The Great Gasby, and how it would not let me sleep because Diasy Buchanan refuses to make me cry when I was already wishing for myself to do so. For your February 01 when people are expecting you to go out and own the day like all the others would stop on Session to give you an easy stroll, there is no need for wine and sweet cakes. There is sufficiency in encountering the warriors in old literatures, seeing their eternal frustrations, smelling the wisdom in their pithy pronouncements.

And so I did well with a liter of coke last night and some Mars and a good dinner. Friday would wait and I texted Ma already, to complete this day. Someone else is dying of hunger and others are wondering if they can still get up to work for the next day, how about the medicine bills and the water bill and the food in the table? Let us throw the clichés away. It is not happy birthday, it is “I am very happy to hear your stomach grunt, and to listen to your absent-minded hummings, and to feel your crashing chuckles, Katrina.” 

 

 

 

Some magic in a single text message, and how I sometimes fall into scrap

This is one of the most frustrating times, for a columnist, even for a monthly. How I would start drafts and die at the middle, realizing how my words are going nowhere special or interesting. How I would avoid that instance when I will receive another text message from the Editor-in-chief, asking me, Katrina draft mo! That exclamation mark was only my doing, despite my failure to meet the deadlines sometimes, I believe that it never came to a point that I was so lost in the calendar she had to use this “!” in her texts.

Perhaps this is the stress of the mid-semester I would not like to acknowledge as “inevitable,” because I feel like doing so would mean that I was dormant and lazy and not diligent to prevent it. Still, it hovers in my head, right now, as I type this, what will I do with my thesis proposal? Where is it heading? And how do I finish reading King Lear in three nights? Perhaps through this:

I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, succeeded up to the 25^th page but grew tired when I felt there was a lack of speech from the characters. I want novels where girls talk and boys admit their sentiments and cry and fail in liquor. So my search for diversion went on.

The other day, I was facing SM, the retail giant, pretending to tower above us all, as I joined quite a number of other enthusiasts who oppose the tree-cutting plan. I felt it sapped a lot of my energy and tore away much of my skin, so I chose to loiter during the weekend. Saturday afternoon, I received a text message: “Kitty, Mt. Cloud tayo.” I thought it through, quite intently, only to end up devising an excuse. “Masakit ulo ko eh, next time na lang.”

There is stupidity in that, you might say, which even though you won’t, still I’m putting on myself. I found myself dramatizing the distress and fatigue I earned from the week, excusing my inappropriate bed rest at the nascence of the weekend. I had the chance to have a walk, smell early evening pine scents and leave my destructive dormancy, but I blew it off. I tried to make up for it, with a tight resolve, I picked myself from the bed and promised I would finish the column before dinner. It should come easy. If I can’t flip the pages of King Lear or open that word document in my desktop with the name “199 crap,” I should be able to finish something.

So here we are.

Thankfully, I have now almost left writing long hand for typing at the keyboard, in that case, there would be no crumple-the-paper-then-throw-them-at-the trash-bin scenes for me. Our trash bin would have been already full right now. But I am not killing my pens and blue notepads, I still rely on them when I am in a ride and something cute gets into my head or when I’m in an unexpected encounter with a genius who can’t run of poetic insights to say.

Like I don’t have them now.

Still struggling, someone texted again, the same person. “Kitty, may nakita akong Junot Diaz! 170 lang!”

Now that is something! What did I do? Put on some decent clothes, fixed hair, went to Mt. Cloud. And made Saturday a bit worthwhile, not to say productive; then return home and write about everything. And mailed upboutcrop@gmail.com, hey mam, here’s my draft.

 

*For last night, this was already my third draft for the January column, and I was out of blood after that, felt like this was already the most decent I can show them. So without surprise, they gave these kinds of edition, comments which no matter how harsh sounds, beget no denial or counter:

General comments:

1. parang naiba personality mo kitty maria. Dati,ikaw ay laging maraming nasasabing kakaiba sa mga mundane na bagay sa mundo. Ngayon ay wala na lang talagang masabi.

 

Isa pang general comment:

1 Maligoy ka Kitty.

2. Successful naman sa pagdedemonstrate na indeed, this is one of the most frustrating of times. Ang kaso, you still need to relate to your readers, would they still find this interesting? may tangent pa kaya ito sa buhay nila, maliban dun sa fact na nakakatamad ang akads?

3. isa pa pala, nasan ang issue na dinadala mo? may sa attempt na magsabing involved ka pa rin, hindi apolitical, kahit paano, dahil sumama ka sa movement. pero naiwan iyong hanging. so ano nga ang iminomoda mo dito kitty?  Ang point siguro, ay wag mahulog sa tendency na magpabasa tayo ng isang random moda, since ang space mo precious. at worthy of greater something kittyness. Baka namimiss na rin nila yung Kitty na may kaunting angst.

4, I suggest a total scrap. : ) you can still improve this though, or you can start from scratch, at iwan ang lahat ng frustrations sa himpapawid, o sa kanal.

5. Labas ka Kitty, para may Makita ka pang ibang bagay na pwede mong isulat-an.

6. Pass your next draft ASAP. Thank you. meow. 

 

 

How to start the new year with a loss

On New Year’s Eve, people were crying in excruciating pain, having lost an arm, or a leg, or a lover’s fingers, curtailing all chances of holding hands moments in the future. In the more placid neighborhood where I happened to drive away the evil spirits for 2012, something similar occurred. Someone from a few blocks away exhibited clumsiness in the wrongest of instance, when the Sinturon ni Hudas is already on fire. Until it became difficult to distinguish his right arm from the firecracker.

Is not that a very fitting way to welcome the New Year, a fitting way to mark the loss of a time frame we called “2011” and begin our wish lists and fancy hopes for a touted beginning? If you happen to feel like sarcasm has been missing recently, you can locate it in somewhere in this article. When something is lost, the hopefuls, mostly the old ones, will say that a replacement is about to come, usually for the better. We have to thank science sometimes, there is the miracle of prosthetics. Then I wonder, what needs to happen for the miracle of change to push through? What losses are we still waiting for us to seethe with hardened teeth and erupting veins in arms and call for a replacement of everything that is in place. I wish, just for the fancy of it, that there would also be prosthetic justice, prosthetic equality, prosthetic social justice. If there would be, I’d summon all the gods so we can altogether wear those prosthetic ones, pronto!

Before 2011 killed itself, we witnessed a lot more losses. Gloria, the favorite president of this generation, lost status, even only a bit, when she was prevented from leaving the country, and then mistaken to be part of the new Naruto series, and then house arrested. Perhaps Pnoy wished he would suddenly get rid of some of the soundest brickbats thrown at him by his critics, for having arrested his notorious predecessor, perpetrator of countless crimes against the people, her constituents, and her conscience. But Gloria’s arrest, however petty it looked and however transitory it would be, is not Pnoy’s triumph, it is the people’s. What we should guard against now is for losses to be recovered and be replaced with more evil vindications.

 

Corona lost the judiciary crown, almost. And if that would mean the loss of an Arroyo court, my fingers are crossed, and I hope yours as well, that it would not be replaced by an Aquino court.

Palparan lost some status, but his laughable pluck and confidence remains. Why laughable? Hehe, who won’t laugh at someone who claims confidence despite the obvious crimes he has committed? And then we wonder, the retired old man may have already lost his military stature, but his network and bosses’ nod may have still remained.

And then one might chastise me. Hell kitty, what happened to your New Year opener? Why proceed on some lousy, and not to say, downgrading politics in the midst of your essay after a cute start? I am just basking at my own discussions of loss, my neighbor will most likely lost an arm, so why don’t we see all the trifles and superficially merry lost outright and start the year right by asking the more relevant questions, pondering on the more relevant matters? And to Gloria and Jovito, I say, get lost!

Happy holidays, cynics!

Of course, this is the merry season. And we, perhaps, will not help but to beam with unfettered giggliness and giddiness and joyfulness. The lights are all set, at the onset of December, at the death of November, at the time when tv stations are premiering their Christmas station ids. Sales are occupying the malls, the tiangges ans commercial bazaars; first, reminding us that ‘tis is the season for shopping, for spending, for expressing our love and gratitude to everyone who has made our year a happy one, as if to glorify the idea of spending for gifts at the big businesses’ favor. We all know the hidden message: capitalism and its evils still lurk, and more notable so during this season. But who cares? That is part of the Christmas tradition.

Corona strikes back and Mindanao got hit by the storm, this time reminding us that this is not picture perfect a season. Gloria remains in jail, but with duly accorded amenities, thanks to her status as policy-maker and being the erstwhile president. Again, we know these, we very well know these, and news clips should only serve as reminders: the sick out of the world continues even if it’s Christmas time.

Always, this is a fitting ending for the year, usually capped by the welcoming of a new year with roar and fireworks and kitchen utensils-turned-pampaingay. All gloominess, all depressions, al failures and sense of shame brought by the previous 11 months, leave them all, happily, with a gorgeous smile, without a heavy heart. Christmas will purge them all, bring them into oblivion, turn them into stone just like all the heroes after their heroics. What a way to end the year, and start the succeeding one.

Academics will most probably try to distance themselves from the merriness, eluding emotion and joy by writing treatises, proving to the world and to themselves that their sort of cynicism about the holidays is a well-justified one by researching on the origin of this event and analyzing them as tied to networks of power and domination. That this is Christianity attempting to firm its grip on its automatic minions, the church-goers, the rosary-holders. That this is capitalism’s most shining moment, reeking million after million, thanks to the high demand for new stilettos, round fruits, ham and pla pla and sinturon ni hudas, new bags, items to give in exchange gifts, books and gadgets, cards and mugs, leathers and kilos of meat.

The well-offs are trooping to the malls, exploiting Christmas sales, letting themselves be exploited by the so-called system. Canvassing, scrutinizing, ogling at new cars, new ipod models, new iphone features, new ways to spend money, new ways to subconsciously justify that a money-centered society is not bad after all.

The beggars are feasting on left-overs, as usual, only that the left-overs seem to be more special this season: palabok, other pasta, cola and meat, hotdogs and marshmallows. The toiling worker will rejoice more on the non-working holidays than Christmas bonuses, as if they can really take a vacation and working overtime is not tempting for its promise of more pay. Perhaps they will be content, very much content in fact, with some adobo and unusually plenty of rice on the 24^th, and some pancit on the 31^st. Everyone is spending the holidays with a heightened spirit, however genuine or forced. Point is: it centrifugates on all of us: the tacit command to be merry because that is the point of the season. With money or not, with lots of gifts or not, with luxurious food or not.

In the name of the season, of Christ being born or the mere passing of December 25, let us make this a merry one. Kindness, generosity, empathy, honest tries at equality and humility, they are all the truest, and hence, fakest, at this time. Let us make the most out of it.

Merry Christmas, in-denial cynics.

Fiction 100.5 and a conglomerate of near-truths

One day, I will also bring flowers for you, like it’s a normalcy, like I just passed through a floral shop earlier after I went to the grocery and I remember you in their scent. This came, amidst digressions from Andre Dubus’ House of Sand and Fog, like what the Persian, ex-officer did to his wife, after he bought a new bungalow for the family.

Then we will have a bungalow too, the neatest, the brightest as it faces the sunrise at 05:55, and the placid sea all time of the day. There will be countless chances to walk through the warm sand, and evening bonfires with curtailed smoke and redefined daydreaming, and wondering about mice and hippopotamus and the coconut trees’ alignment. And I will write your name in the sand, the way I won’t write them here, because you know, we are all cowards, utilizing poetry and metaphors and tv screens and jokes and alibis to shroud the things we will not tell right here.

There will be a cafeteria nearby and I will bring you there every Sunday morning, every fragrant, pleasant 7:04 Sunday mornings. We will have a car, a Beatle, a light green Beatle with a good jazz music playing inside it every time, and we will listen to it, for twenty minutes or so, before we reach the cafeteria, before we meet good, old and mild-natured Granny again. That is what we call the old lady selling coffee, making coffee, heartily smiling at every customer perhaps because that is the only thing she can do well with her age. We will sit on the corner, the one nearest to a Rivermaya poster, oh the good, old days, the late 90s when we were still stuck at school pants and bulky backpacks. You will glance at the old four who perhaps sang to you when you got depressed in 2005 or something, and you will do that like for a minute, until I call you and say uy, kape mo.

You are good at coffee that is pure coffee, proving to Zizek, the old guy our friends used to love in college, that there are still people who are after the substance of the substance, the thing that makes the thing itself. You will stir your coffee, very, very lazily, while still looking at Japs Sergio; like in the old days when you will lazily stay in bed because Mondays are commonly lazy, and you will prod me to hit the bathroom first. And mine, mine would be the perfect combination of liberal sugar and a morsel of creamer, coffee ought to be sweet for me, unless I am planning to read Shakespeare or Dante in the night. And I will look around the cafeteria, and will see no one familiar; in universes that we have been through, it seldom happens that we were strangers to them, only two people who happen to like to stroll and smell polluted air and share breaths with tens of others, sightsee 7/11’s new products, or vintage shirts sold in the street.

In the end of fiction, what is next? Murakami killed Toru in page 607, or did he, really? Perhaps he went on waiting for Kumiko, perhaps he went on drinking beer at 8pms, perhaps he went on playing idly with Mackerel before lunch. Fictions live in us, my teacher once said that she would read fictions several times at different points in time, the first during 1999 and the next on February 2003, the next on July 2003, and every reading will give her something new. Is fiction hermetic as empty jelly containers that kill flies trapped in them? I look back at the cafeteria and the Beatle and the bungalow and without having to cross my fingers, I know we will still live, and outside fictions, and I, sometimes will want to come to you to make real things happen.

god, opium, and my old need for “high”ness

Sad poetries, in dead times like these, it seems opportune for them. While the gods are keeping themselves away from bacchanalian feasts, I am subconsciously, sorrowfully putting myself under the arrest of mindless gluttony. Coffee crumble melting inside Gardenia breads, dry spaghetti pasta, Jollibee Shanghai rolls, lanky stick-o champolas, macaroni soup and adobong manok and mounds of good, white rice. The psychology of food only reveals to me how morose I am about my presently glaring Freudian lack. And food, delightful materials that are being taken into the bodily system, they induce to me a temporary paranoia, a going berserk because of an illusionary fullness. We see how fascinating differences operate: the lack and the fullness, albeit one is lasting, hence more threatening, while the other is only fleeting.

And when I am supposed to be spurning at language and kneading it to become unforgettable forms of verses, I am idling away and making myself a forgettable piece of Holy Week waste. So thank you jesus for making a huge piece of bum out of me in your dramatic death, one of the highlights of the play that was your sacrificial demise for the weal of humanity. This week has been as penitentiary as you wanted for all people, and I do not believe that I am becoming sacrilegious. I am simply undermining your virility as a text.

Misplaced angst, perhaps. Given the ridiculous tragedy I am forced to face now, in the heyday of machine-like faith and religion, where should this angst go but in scattered notes dedicated to someone who is at par only with Rizal or Don Quixote. What am I saying? Is god being mocked for being compared with the two, or the two being too glorified by being compared with god. Ahm, I go for the first one. I am more a fan of mockeries and parodies and subtle undermining.